Modernity and Its Victims Ravi Sundaram Modernity and the Holocaust by Zygmunt Bauman; Polity Press, Oxford,
IN an oft-quoted statement, the late Theodor Adorno once said that it is impossible to write poetry after Auschwitz. For Adorno and many of his generation, social theory could never be the same after the holocaust, the universalist meta-nanatives of western civilisation could not prevent the slaughter of millions in gas chambers. True to his word, Adorno went on to write Negative Dialectics, a trenchant critique of the foundations of western philosophy from Hegel to Heidegger. For a long time Adorno's philosophical tour de force re mained a solitary. .juiry into the relevance of social critique after the holocaust. Historians of the holocaust (and there are many) have tended to focus more on the uniqueness of acts of genocide by the Nazis rather than raise crucial questions on the relevance of the holocaust for modernity.1 This gap is remedied by the publication of Zygmunt Bauman's Modernity and the Holocaust. In the best tradition of critical theory, Bauman refuses to see the holocaust as but the irruption of a pre-modern barbarism on the continuum of history, rather, genocide is a possibility inherent in the civilising process itself. For Bauman the holocaust was "a legitimate resident in the house of modernity" (p 17); it is this statement that is explicated in various chapters of the book.
